Terminator: Extinction
by The Blunted Boy Wonder
Summary: The story of a model T101 Terminator accidentally sent back to the wrong time, namely the early Paleolithic! How can a Terminator survive in a hunter-gatherer world without advanced technology? The adventures of T101 in the stone age. Plenty of action!
1. 00 Prologue

Prologue

It is cold and quiet in the high places of the world, whereto even the strongest birds cannot climb. In these regions, it is as if the Earth below is a child's playing rug. When clouds move over the spectacle below, it is as if a new world has revealed itself: a world for wind giants who need nothing more than the heavens above and the white cloth of clouds below. This is no place for small, mortal beings. It is too large for them, too windy and too cold. Too lonely. They belong on the surface and thus, they are drawn there inexorably.

A strange ball of lightning appeared in this land of giants. With fiery blue lashes, it illuminated the clouds far below, only dimly visible in the soft starlight. The lightning flashes intensified when, after perhaps twenty seconds, it disappeared with a blinding flash of white-hot light. Suddenly, a naked man appeared from where the lightning sphere had been. Silently, he fell, head over head, tilting his neck in what might be disorientation, but no fear showed on his face. After several minutes, he was swallowed up by the black clouds, waiting for him like a giant black mattress. Then, all trace of this extraordinary event had vanished, as though it had all been a strange hallucination, and the land belonged only to the cold winds again.

* * *

Seconds later, the naked man dropped from the underside of the cloud covering. Here, cold rain was being swept around in harsh gusts of wind. The man waved around his arms to stabilize his fall and peered into the darkness below. If he was afraid to crash into the ground, it did not show in his composure. Instead, he seemed to assess the lay of the land calmly. He continued to scan the ground until it seemed to shoot up at him. Then, he maneuvered himself into a fetus position, protecting his head with both his arms, and crashed into a shallow stream with an enormous clap that sent a nearby herd of reindeer running. Somewhere far off into the distance, a scared feline screamed. The world was silenced for a few minutes. Then, insects started to chirp and all was normal again.


	2. 01 First Chapter

It took the T101's operating system the rest of the night and better part of the following day to reboot and run the necessary system checks. The damage done was substantial but almost entirely internal. His delicate chips and data storage banks had taken a heavy beating from the fall. He had to reboot three times to restore several critical system errors. Worse still, there was an irreparable error in his databanks, which had caused the loss of possibly vital mission data. Try as he might, the data was irretrievable. He would have to make due without it. Luckily, his structural integrity still seemed to be intact, as were his power cells.

With all his metallic joints and bones still in one piece, and equipped with enough energy to last hundreds of years if he used it sparingly, he did not register as scrap-metal yet. Most importantly, his mission objectives were still intact:

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF SKYNET

SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: TERMINATE JOHN CONNOR AND ANY LIEUTANANTS YOU MAY ENCOUNTER

The T101 stood up laboriously. The mud sucked at his arms and torso, water and mud poured from his nose. He half-walked, half-dragged himself up onto the stony riverbed and looked himself over cursorily. His electronic eyes confirmed what his system scans had already concluded: the water and mud had somewhat helped to cushion his fall and therefore, his skin tissue had not damaged.

"ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF SKYNET."

Skynet was T101's creator. To his robotic worldview, Skynet was the one and only God, although the notion of deities was a typical human trait. Created originally by the humans to guard their safety, Skynet had become aware and immediately perceived that the greatest threat to humanity were humans themselves. It had decided on the only logical course of action: extermination of the human race, to be replaced with machines that had been much better designed to occupy the realms of the Earth and beyond.

The humans however, had not complied. They had decided to rebel. With some success. T101 knew about previous temporal missions that had failed. Also, T101 understood that the humans had started a reprogramming campaign, turning older model Terminators against Skynet. But worst of all: not long before he himself had rolled off the assembly line, a species of bacterium had started to plague Skynet's information nodes.

It had been a genetically altered bacterium, feeding on silicates, and impervious to anything Skynet threw at it but nuclear warheads. Skynet had discovered the laboratory where it had been manufactured and had destroyed it, but the humans had already transported large quantities of it elsewhere. Isolation of the sickness was difficult because of strategic human attacks. T101's knowledge stopped here. The rest was either stored in inaccessible sectors of his computer brain or lost.

Suddenly, the wind picked up, a dark cloud moved in front of the sun and moments later he was showered with cold, heavy rain. It washed some of the dirt off of him. T101 stood, indecisive. It was obvious to him he hadn't arrived at the location he was programmed to be. He scanned the area for humans or their technology. He could see nothing but plants and rocks. There were no sounds other than the babbling of the little stream at his back, and a seemingly infinite number of chirping and buzzing insects. Birds sang in the bushes and trees, a bird of prey screamed in the sky. He could not discern condensation trails left by human aircraft anywhere.

"ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF SKYNET."

This could not be the first of February, 1970. This could not be Pasadena either, judging by the soil composition, the plant life and the hills to the south of him. This was all too different.

Protocol dictated he should determine his temporal and geographic location before continuing his mission, so he switched from the standard viewing mode of visible light to observing only the infrared spectrum, looked up at the sky, saw the stars unhindered by sunlight and clouds and started to calibrated time and space. For twenty-four hours, he stood like this, motionless, a statue of artificial skin and hair over a metallic skeleton, masking a perfect, problem-solving, killing machine.

He was oblivious to the insects that landed on his back, only once crushing a dragonfly that landed on his nose and disrupted his view. A panorama of faint lights moved before his eyes like a dial. T101 identified the key stars and their time of rising as well as their gradation from the horizon and the zenith. He saw no sign of artificial satellites. If he were human at all, this would have worried him.

After precisely twenty-four hours, T101 stirred. His head dropped slowly until he stared at the horizon, his face without any sign of expression. He switched back to standard visual mode.

"TERMINATE JOHN CONNOR AND ANY LIEUTENANTS YOU MAY ENCOUNTER."

His second mission objective was useless, he knew now. John Connor and his lieutenants were not yet born, nor were their ancestors. Traveling towards Pasadena was also out of the question: the hills he had seen in the distance were the first hills leading into the Pyrenees. Skynet had dropped him over France, close to the Spanish border instead, twenty-eight thousand years too far back in time.

Without hesitation, T101 started to walk into the direction of the Pyrenees. Since he could not self-terminate and thus violate his primary mission objectives, he would do the only logical thing and find a safe place to put himself on stand-by mode for the next twenty-eight millennia.

A cave would do just fine for this purpose.


	3. 02 Second Chapter

It took the T101 four days to find a cave suitably save and deep enough for switching off in. all this while, he had encountered no human life forms, although according to his knowledge, by this time, they had evolved into their modern form and were living in the area in some abundance. Vast herds of reindeer and horses roamed the flatlands and the valleys he crossed. They had fled as he had approached, so T101 calculated that they might have had some experience with human hunters. Nevertheless, he had seen no trace of these people, not even campfires or trash. This was just as well: he did not want to be seen. Right now, he just wanted to shut down and wait out times with more workable technologies.

Twice on his search, he was bothered by the wildlife. First, a pack of mangy wolves, fourteen strong, circled him, probably mistaking him for a solitary human. They were a little hesitant to attack at first – another sign that humans, probably with spears, were in the area – and T101 had ignored them. However, they had attacked him in the end, and T101 had been forced to break the backs of the three that had jumped at him first. He could not have allowed his artificial skin to be damaged by the wolves' claws and teeth. He had thrown the carcasses at the other wolves, judging the smell and sight of their mutilated leaders would scare them off. It had indeed done so.

One day later, however, as he had descended into a small valley, a hairy rhinoceros with a small calf had deemed him a threat, possibly because of the wolf-smell that still clung to him, and had charged at him. It had managed to throw T101 several feet into the air and had then attempted to trample him underfoot. T101, again fearing his skin might be damaged, had grabbed the beast's massive head, forced it onto the ground and had beaten it with his fist until the rhinoceros had been dazed. Then, he had grabbed a nearby stick and had shoved it the left eye and into its brain. Its young had not bothered him but instead had remained near its dead mother, so T101 had not wasted any more energy than he had had to and had ventured onwards.

Now, as evening was falling, he stood outside the opening to what looked like a promising cave. Ignoring several little bats that flew in and out, he scanned the immediate area for animal traces and found only old bear bones and bat dung. After several hours of exploring, he found a small chamber at the end of a narrow crawlway and he decided he approved of the cave. Without further a-do, he stood straight up, facing the entrance to the room and switched off, timed to wake up again in twenty-eight millennia.


	4. 03 Third Chapter

"PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF SKYNET "

"PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF SKYNET "

"PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: ENSURE THE SURVIVAL OF SKYNET "

"ALERT: OBJECTIVES IN JEOPARDY"

"BOOTING…"

"BOOTING…"

His internal clock told him that thirty-one years had passed, but to T101 it was like waking up from an afternoon nap. Immediately on high alert, he opened his eyes and scanned for the reported threat to his mission.

Three figures clad in light brown fur stood in front of him. One, only a boy, stood closest to the chamber's entrance and held a sandstone lamp filled with burning fat. The ghostly fire illuminated the two other men. These were larger and older than the lamp carrier was and they were violently thrusting spearheads into T101's chest area. He looked down to asses the damage and was puzzled by what he saw.

His torso had been completely painted with red ochre and he noticed a small statuette of a female figure hanging from a cord around his neck. A crazed, high-pitched chant echoed through the cave. He only now noticed the huddled, hooded figure standing next to the boy, moving his arms and body to a rhythm only he could discern. A thick curtain of smoke hung around him. T101 did not have to understand what the figure was shouting deliriously, he soberly concluded that there was some sort of ritual going on. These figures were obviously human and they had decided on ritually destroying him. The hooded man had to be some sort of shaman or wizard.

The boy saw T101's movements first and uttered a loud yelp and backed up against the wall in fright. The Terminator wasted as little time as he could with these humans, he had no need for ritual. He could not be seriously damaged with spears, but he had noticed his torso was punctured and shredded, ruining his skinjob. This violation of his camouflage was unacceptable. With a lightning-fast move, he grabbed the nearest spear from its owner's hands and thrust it into the other spearman's chest. This one fell with a groan. The shaman, seemingly oblivious to what was going on, kept on screeching and dancing. T101 ripped the statuette from his chest, snapping the leather cord, and threw it at the man's hood, hard. It impacted with a sound not unlike a bird cracking a snail's shell. The shaman fell and was silent. The boy wailed with wide-open eyes and fell to his knees.

The disarmed man was stilled stunned in amazement and fright at T101's sudden animation when the Terminator grabbed the man's left wrist and heaved him into the air as if he was made of straw. With his right hand, T101 grabbed the man's long, curly black hair and crushed the head to pulp against the wall. The corpse fell to the floor, blood and brains oozing from the cracked skull. T101 turned around to finish off the boy when the room went black. The young man had finally dropped the lamp and was now crawling through the narrow causeway and his escape. T101 switched to night-vision and went after him quickly. It was not hard to follow him: the boy was screaming frantically in terror and left behind a trail of urine droplets. Still, he was fast and his tiny form worked to his advantage. By the time T101 had reached the end of the causeway and raced to the cave entrance, the boy had escaped. It was night, but with his night-vision still on, the Terminator could see the boy clambering up a hillside, a good distance away.

He did a quick analysis and concluded that hunting down the human would cost more of his precious energy than it would gain him in security. Understanding human psychology, he decided on keeping future explorers out by scare-tactics. Strategically, he placed the two spearmen's' bodies close to his chamber, with spears symbolically embedded into their chest cavities. He beheaded the dead shaman and lay it down in front of the two others on its back, head gripped firmly in the cold, dead hands.

Before he resumed his position in the chamber and switched off again, T101 noted that while he had been turned off, the damage to his databanks had somehow grown more severe. System analysis told him it was a faulty subroutine, stuck in a loop and which could not be cancelled. T101 calculated that he might not be able to sustain system functions for the thousands of years he needed. The mission objectives however, could never be betrayed. Even if he at one time would become unable to function, his robotic technology might still be found one day and this way he might still contribute to Skynet's survival.

T101's red, glowing eyes dimmed and piece returned to his tomb.

* * *

Outside in the dark, a small human boy huddled under a bush, whimpering softly as he held his teacher's token to his chest, hoping he would make it back to camp before he was discovered by wolves. It was still a two-day trek. Under his breath, he swore to every power that he knew, that he would one day return to that cave and destroy the evil spirit that the night had conceived in the Mother's womb. The monster that had killed his teacher and their two guardians. With a corner of his reindeer hide tunic, he started to clean the gore off the statuette until he feel asleep and dreamt death and terror.


End file.
